Manus Banks $500M While China Holds the Door Shut on Meta's $2B Exit 🦾

Manus, the AI agent startup that Meta agreed to buy for roughly $2 billion before China forced the deal to be unwound, has raised more than $500 million in new funding, parent company Butterfly Effect confirmed in a WeChat post. Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the round, with existing backers Tencent, HSG (the firm formerly known as Sequoia China) and ZhenFund also participating. The company did not disclose a valuation, but Bloomberg previously reported the raise was targeted at a $4 billion valuation, about double what Meta had agreed to pay. Butterfly Effect said it plans to keep hiring in China and abroad but did not specify how the new capital will be used.

Manus builds AI agents, software designed to take a goal and carry it out autonomously, from booking trips to analyzing stocks, rather than only answering questions like a chatbot. The product launched in March 2025 as a Chinese rival to OpenAI's $200-a-month agent and was initially open by invitation only. Demand was reportedly so intense that invite codes were listed on a Chinese resale marketplace for as much as 10 million yuan, over $1.3 million. The company has acknowledged using Anthropic's Claude and fine-tuned versions of Alibaba's Qwen models alongside its own technology.

The company relocated its team to Singapore around mid-2025, wound down most of its China operations and laid off dozens of employees in July. By December it had reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue, about eight months after launch, the same month Meta announced it would acquire Manus for roughly $2 billion. OpenAI later hired OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger to lead its push into personal agents, with CEO Sam Altman saying the effort is expected to become core to the company's product offerings, and described plans for "very smart agents interacting with each other to do very useful things for people."

China's commerce ministry said in January it would assess the Manus deal. By March, co-founders Xiao Hong and Ji Yichao had been summoned to Beijing and barred from leaving the country, according to Reuters. On April 27, the National Development and Reform Commission, China's top economic planning agency, ordered the deal withdrawn and said it would "prohibit foreign investment in Manus" in the future, leaving the freshly funded startup to chart its next chapter from Singapore.